Tonight, we finally ate a dish from West Africa that delighted our taste buds. Not only did I enjoy the meal but my wife Anne (the pickiest in the family) did too.

The dish I decided to prepare this evening is a traditional dish from Togo, one of the smallest countries in Africa, a former French colony. Gboma dessi is really a sauce. It is also called “sauce feuille” in reference to the spinach leaves (feuilles in French). Once prepared, the sauce can be served with meat, shrimp, crab or smoked fish.

For my version of gboma dessi, I chose beef, especially beef cheek. You can choose the piece of meat that you want as long as you follow the preparation method specific to the Togolese traditional dish, which also known in Benin and Ghana (under the name of shoko).

The gboma dessi can be used with various sides such as white rice. You can imagine that I was not going to settle on a simple white rice! During my research, I discovered that this dish could also be served with ablo or akoumé. Now we’re talking! Two unique words that I had never heard before. Enough to satisfy my thirst for learning.

Ablo and akoumé, which are quite similar, are kind of dumplings that serve as staples in West African cuisine. They may seem rather bland or tasteless at first, but they are used primarily to absorb the flavors of saucy dishes like this one. After going through several time-consuming recipes that required a rather tedious steaming stage, I opted for a fairly quick but still traditional recipe of akoumé (also called tô).

I was quite satisfied with the dinner I had in mind… but my satisfaction reached a whole new level when I came across a recipe for gboma dessi that spoke about a spice blend called gbotemi. Yes, another interesting word. West African cuisine often includes voodoo-like methods of bewitchment. In Togo and Benin, gbotemi means “listen to me” or “do what I say.” Legend has it that African women concoct their spice blends to bewitch their husbands so that they listen to them. So I concocted my a gbotemi of my own… it is now 3 hours after we finished dinner … and I still do not see any improvement in the behavior of my dear and loving wife… but let’s not give up, there is a enough gboma dessi for tomorrow lunch… to be continued …

Mike is “the devil”. Nicknamed as such by his sidekicks, he is constantly in search of unusual recipes and techniques with impossible to find ingredients. Some would say he lost his hair finding so many recipes with unpronounceable names, but he’s been bald for a while already. The devil is always pushing the envelope, whether it is with humor or culinary surprises.